Google continues to hit milestones with Google Apps – 2 million businesses and 20 million users in over 100 countries and 40 languages (up from 1.75 million businesses in June). And they aren’t slowing down the advertising, either.
The Going Google campaign, first launched in August (and spoofed within a day) with billboards that changed messages daily, is expanding.
The target? Microsoft Office/Exchange/Sharepoint. The message? Give your employees shared documents, calendars, email, etc. without the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out software updates. Customers are pointed to google.com/gogoogle.
Tonight Google is announcing the expansion of the Going Google campaign into the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore (”train stations such as Paddington, La DĂ©fense and Shinagawa, and at airports in Singapore, Toronto, Dallas and beyond”). They’re also announcing new enterprise customers onica Minolta, Rentokil Initial and TOTO. Other recent customer wins include Recent wins include Motorola’s handset division (20K users), Konica Minolta (7K users), Rentokil Initial (business services company, 35K users), and MeadWestVaco (VA based global packaging company, 17K users).
They’ve also created a montage video of the campaign:
Rather have exchange, it never goes down.
I have noticed a lot of problems lately, but I’m not sure it would make me go back to exchange.
Of course exchange goes down too. However in the last 10 years at companies of all sizes I can think of 1-2 major outages. Gmail seems to have an outage every quarter and it drives people crazy.
I only ever remember one big Gmail outage
You have a poor memory.
I just read a Paul Carr post, in which he brutalized Seth McFarlane for daring to sell his soul to MS for the Windows 7 Family Guy episode. The jist seemed to be that rather than product placement, or straight-up advertising, Seth had crossed the line by promoting a company within the context of the show…thus destroying the credibility of the future episodes. I agree….its crap….and a sell-out move by a guy who used to do what he wanted.
But then I stumble across this glorified Google Apps Ad by Arrington. Its not a right hand ad…its not a banner….its not a Goog Sponsored event….its an ad disguised as a post. This obviously ruins the credibility of future posts, as you have to consider whether or not they were each bought and paid for. There are plenty of others than blur the line….the Y Combinator announcements get a bit silly…but at least they are news, and often contain at least a sentence of independent thought. This post on the other hand was pure marketing copy.
I could care less if TC wants to generate revenue through posts like this….writers being paid to say the right things is a tradition as old as writing itself….but to butcher the practice in an unrelated post just a day prior is so comically ironic that it can’t not be addressed. What a joke.
my thoughts exactly.
+1
Just today I gave Google Docs another look and liked what they’ve done to make it better. Even the save keyboard command worked ( I was using Google Chrome. ) I do like using it so far.
The gmail outages have not affected me as I use IMAP and it seems to go even when web gmail is not working.
Right .. as nothing can be match to the standard of MS office .. not only Google but yahoo also provides online docs .. once Microsoft launches online office . ..I dnt think these 2 or another online docs service will be able to survive …
Best,
Daina
office online will kill this so fast
I agree. Office online will kill any chance of Google Docs going mainstream.
Office online can only beat Google Docs by matching it for price. And if it does that, Microsoft loses anyway.
what if google buys ms office?
I’d like to know what percentage of these companies “Going Google” are really only using Postini and not any of the other Google products.
+1
Mike – referring to your recent posts it seems Google DOES know where New Zealand is… (refer 0:59 in the vid)
I’m not sure that it is NZ. The plates on the cars are yellow. In NZ they’re generally black on white.
I could be wrong though.
Pretty embarrassing for google if you’re right.
Sorry It still sucks. lol I like open office a whole lot better
Googtards. Gone Google is a load of steaming PR. We supposedly run Google but my IT guy is about to get hacked for it b/c tey have missed the uptime like 50% of the year. Not too mention no one knows how to use the damn stuff and all the new features freak people out. We can’t even have a new coffee machine in my office much less new friggin buttons appearing in our apps. Hope more knucklehead IT/CIO guys sign up, hang their ass out there so we know not to hire them after they get canned.
I could give it a try at home but sorry, for the office, MS Office will always be a winner.
Hmm…
Google Docs is horrible. Kind of like a beta release of Word around 1990.
Some how it may great news but it bad for those who looks for free computing and free
Already Google is stealing our privacy using ” Web history ” and our information through the “Google Documents ” in association with ” Gmail”.
I think now Google is competing with Microsoft not for providing value added tools network but for creating monopoly over web.
“Google ” is more hazardous than ” Microsoft” in all the ways .
Michael, I think you meant Konika Minolta…
P.S. On the subject: somebody should create a WordPress plug-in or something like that where if a blogger misspells a word on his blog, visitors can correct it and if say a certain number of people correct the same word, it will automatically be changed… I suppose it will not be hard to do something like that but the benefits are definitely there. Just an idea.
I don’t know what’s so good about Google Apps.
Sure I use Google Docs (rarley) and Gmail, Google Calandar and so on. The problem is there are quite many bugs, and many of them don’t get fixed at all or it takes very long time.
Importing documents in Google Docs doesn’t always keep formatting. I even lost parts of text in cells when importing an ODS file. I had to save it in XLS before importing.
Google Calendar has had a time bug for months now. I reported it but Google doesn’t seem to care.
Everything typed as “Work 1.00″ to “Work 6.00″ becomes PM. You’d have to use “Work 6am” for it to save the correct time.
Ah right, and don’t forget the silly thing that week numbers isn’t built in Google Calendar. You have enable a calendar to get that…
I am excited to know after their expansion plan in australia as well
Looking forward
Never really liked either the Google Docs or Google Apps brand names.
If Google really wanted to go after Microsoft Office, then they should have named their Web Office Services – Google Office.
A Google Office brand name with all of Google’s major Web Office Services integrated inside would have made a bigger splash.
The trouble with Google is that they scatter all of their other major Web Services under the uncool ‘More’ Tab.
A Google Office Tab incorporated on their main Homepage would have promoted Google’s Web Office Services a lot more better with mainstream audiences.
I like competition and welcome Google into the space, but so far I’m not impressed, there are other on line services that are superior and have
been on the market longer.
Why Google gets so much attention for these efforts is a mystery.
Because they have the reputation of building awesome and low priced web-services ? And have been one of the most inovative IT company so far ?
Giving attention to an It world leader for a new service they provide to the pros is nothing of a mystery …
Ps: kinda like their TV ad, Ads panels are funny too .. looking forward to see some in France.
I just read a Paul Carr post, in which he brutalized Seth McFarlane for daring to sell his soul to MS for the Windows 7 Family Guy episode. The jist seemed to be that rather than product placement, or straight-up advertising, Seth had crossed the line by promoting a company within the context of the show…thus destroying the credibility of the future episodes. I agree….its crap….and a sell-out move by a guy who used to do what he wanted.
But then I stumble across this glorified Google Apps Ad by Arrington. Its not a right hand ad…its not a banner….its not a Goog Sponsored event….its an ad disguised as a post. This obviously ruins the credibility of future posts, as you have to consider whether or not they were each bought and paid for. There are plenty of others than blur the line….the Y Combinator announcements get a bit silly…but at least they are news, and often contain at least a sentence of independent thought. This post on the other hand was pure marketing copy.
I could care less if TC wants to generate revenue through posts like this….writers being paid to say the right things is a tradition as old as writing itself….but to butcher the practice in an unrelated post just a day prior is so comically ironic that it can’t not be addressed. What a joke.
Google Docs looks exactly like Office in early 90s, I don’t imagine a corporate or even a home user would compare it to Microsoft Office, or even Open office, the only feature Google Docs had that MS office didn’t have (unless you have Sharepoint) is the sharing and collaboration capabilities, and even this feature is done in 2010 and it is even more advanced and exposes almost all the features the are exposed in the desktop version.
Google Docs is not even compared to other online office suits such as Zoho.
Google is an overhyped company that just excels in Search, they should stick with it.
Actually, Office from the 80’s was better than Google Docs.
I’ll have to give it a try, but will it be as good as Microsoft? It seems too risky now.
I wonder if all the people that have Gone Google watched this: http://hungrybe...ies/google-me-0